You read that right — we’ll start offering a free, condensed version of the original “Intro to FreeNAS” classes soon. Linda Kateley will still cover the same topics as the full-length class including web UI, setup, volumes, and datasets but the sessions will be much shorter. For now, we’d like to give our newsletter subscribers exclusive early access. We’ll be running a free session on Monday, 6/16 at 1PM EST. Each class (including this one) will be limited to 45 attendees but we expect those spots to fill up fast, so be sure to sign up soon.

We’re making a couple of changes to fit the new format. The ability to give verbal feedback will be removed due to the increased number of participants but attendees will be able to ask questions via chat. We will also offer paid, advanced FreeNAS classes for more in-depth instruction about the following topics:

System Administration

FreeNAS Sharing

FreeNAS Systems Design and Architecture

A beta of the system administration class will also be available soon with priority access for people who attended the full-length intro classes.

Jordan Hubbard, co-founder of FreeBSD and head of FreeNAS engineering, updates us about the project’s current developments. Go ahead and click play below to learn about the upcoming 9.2.1.6 release, and what is to come in FreeNAS 9.3.

Michael W Lucas is back again with this blog about FreeBSD disk partitioning.

The FreeBSD kernel understands several different disk partitioning schemes, including the traditional x86 MBR (slices), the current GPT, BSD disklabels, as well as schemes from Apple, Microsoft, NEC (PC98), and Sun. The gpart(8) tool is intended as a generic interface that lets you manage disk partitioning in all of these schemes, and abstract away all of the innards in favor of saying “Use X partitioning system on this disk, and put these partitions on it.” It’s a great goal.

FreeBSD storage, and computing storage in general, is in a transitory state today. The older tools, fdisk and bsdlabel, aren’t exactly deprecated but they are not encouraged. x86 hardware is moving towards GPT, but there’s an awful lot of MBR-only gear deployed. Disks themselves are moving from the long-standing 512B sector size to 4KB, eight times larger.

The FreeNAS team has released a tutorial showing you how to set up AFP, NFS, and CIFS shares on FreeNAS 9.2.1.5. In addition, there is a section about setting up Time Machine via AFP. Go ahead and hit play below to learn:

If you have a spare system or virtual machine, consider testing this image. If you find any bugs, report them at https://trac.pcbsd.org so we can take a look at fixing them before 10.0.2 is released later this month.

nixCraft has created a YouTube tutorial explaining the installation process for FreeBSD 10. If you have not tried installing it yet, you can follow along with this guide by checking out the video below: